Law and globalisation - powerful or powerless

The leading human rights lawyer Baroness Helena Kennedy gave a stirring defence of the principle of universal human rights when she delivered the Annual Isaiah Berlin Lecture on law and globalization at Wolfson College. She took as the starting point for her lecture the global economic crisis, which clearly demonstrated the importance of accepted norms to regulate today's interconnected world, and the need for the law to cross national borders to hold wrongdoers to account in the globalized marketplace. Addressing issues such as the position and treatment of women, same-sex rights, immigration, and asylum policy, Baroness Kennedy charted the development of the idea of universal human rights to better understand the controversy it attracts today. She offered the salutary reminder that the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) was drafted at the urging of Winston Churchill as a way of unifying people behind principles that would prevent the type of atrocities that had taken place in the Second World War. This effort to embed values in law was not intended to create global law, she explained, but to bring about a template against which national laws can be measured. Whilst acknowledging that developing nations may see human rights as a preoccupation of the wealthy, she vigorously defended human rights discourse against the claims of cultural relativism, which relegates human values below the claims of local culture. Strict cultural relativism, she argued, can often be a justification for human rights abuse, and uncritical acceptance of cultural relativism prevents us from examining the very societal structures that create the cultural norm.